Greil Marcus, the esteemed cultural critic, laconically and simply pens, “Writers write. They can’t help it.” Marcus knows better than most: in 1968, at 23, he began sending reviews to Rolling Stone before becoming its editor and, thereafter, wrote for the Detroit-based no-holds-barred magazine Creem. Furthermore, he has written critically acclaimed books, such as Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘N’ Roll Music (1975); Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989); Invisible Republic (1997); and, more recently, Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs (2022).
After half a century primarily writing about musicians, Marcus delivers a personal and philosophical treatise on why he writes in What Nails It, as part of the Yale University Press’ series Why I Write, based on the Windham-Campbell Lectures, delivered annually to commemorate the awarding of the Dialed Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature prizes at Yale University. The result: a meditation on memory, myth, past, history, the role of art in society, and, of course, music. Therefore it is another Marcus book that is far more than its title and its subject; the interest lies in the peregrination of the author’s imagination: ideas flow from thought to thought—forwards, backward, laterally, not always in that order—that you become subsumed into the expansiveness and erudition of his mind.
The degree to which Greil Marcus jumps across epochs, art forms, and songs in a single bound is that he could almost rival Bob Beamon for his Olympic record; What Nails It is that impressive. The pleasure is seeing where his train of thought will lead you—and not. Lastly, often in his sinuous and elliptical prose, fact and fiction merge into poetic indeterminacy, like a nebulous 1960s garage rock tune, only that it can be held.
It is neither an overstatement nor revelatory to say that the best writings on Bob Dylan—for half a century—have been by Greil Marcus. Through plumbing the depths of old-time music, leaving you knowing a difference between Appalachian ballad singer Nimrod Workman and singer and banjo player Dock Boggs, a waulking song from a border ballad, Marcus has perhaps come the nearest in capturing the protean singer-songwriter—or, at least, the tradition behind Dylan—by approaching him from a distance. The reason is that the closer you get to Dylan, the harder it is to see him: he evaporates. It leaves you questioning if creation is more real than a person, a mask more revealing than a visage, an alias ringing truer than a birthname. Dylan has made for a perfect subject for Marcus, who, throughout his oeuvre, has proven that facts can be more elusive than fiction; fiction is often more “truthful” than fact.
Bob Dylan’s statement, “It’s like a ghost is writing a song like that”—when describing writing the song “Like a Rolling Stone” to Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times in 2004—becomes the specter of What Nails It. Marcus finds the ghostlike act of creation engrossing. Speaking to Martin Scorsese in 2019, Bruce Springsteen, over two weeks in April 2019, visited a different room in his house each day and ended up with almost an album’s worth of material after seven years of not writing. Creativity can arrive unbidden or invited, quickly or protractedly-mined, in ebbs and flows. However it comes, the result is sometimes ineffable. Marcus, in effect, rejects the book’s premise: “as if why anyone is a writer is something that can be explained at all.”
Like a triptych, there are three chapters to What Nails It: “Greil Gerstley”, “Pauline Kael”, and “Titian”. In the first chapter, the most personal of the three, Marcus reveals that his father, Greil Gerstley, an executive officer on the destroyer the Hull, was killed in the Second World War six months and a day before he was born. The name was all Marcus was left. When his mother, Eleanor Gerstley (née Hyman), remarried a San Franciso lawyer, Gerald Marcus, he adopted him, bestowing Greil his surname.
Growing up, Greil never heard his mother speak about his father and their past together—and when he first tried to draw out information from her, she said she didn’t remember; their time had been short. Although Marcus, in retrospect, does not begrudge, it had an effect: he became fixated on the lack of information of his past to reconstruct actual events past or present. He realized the past could be told differently, rewritten, and recreated. As the Marxist art critic John Berger wrote, “The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can’t do is to change its consequences. Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.”
As Greil Marcus is a private person, it is somewhat surprising to read these passages. Yet it doesn’t seem incongruous with Marcus, the critic, as the tone in What Nails It is never mawkish, the content is never self-indulgent, and, more importantly, the book demands a biographical account. The potential driving force behind Marcus’ writing—an unconscious attempt to get to grips with the silence enveloping his father’s death—is analogous to Marcel Proust and his poor memory. In other words, you pursue what you lack. “A memory without fault is not a very powerful incentive for studying the phenomena of memory… just as someone who goes to sleep the minute his head touches the pillow can hardly be expected to make even cursory observations on sleep… a little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep,” Proust writes in 1913’s In Search of Lost Time.
In the first chapter, Marcus’ main exposition is that personal memory is shaped and morphed into cultural memory. According to Marcus, writing is rooted in memory; his writing is rooted in a doubled memory, a false memory within an actual incident. The question: is personal memory an illusion? Do we just retell ourselves and others our personal stories—often things we do not experience first-hand—that our parents, teachers, whoever told us, over and over, until it gets stuck, like a name, like a record?
Greil Marcus views specific, personal stories as part of a larger, universal story. On the one hand, we tend to relive our memories through external sources: art, literature, film, music, etc. On the other hand, cultural memory becomes the primary source if you cannot recall your personal experience. Thus, the arts are less a reflection of your life—echoing specific scenes from your past—than the memory itself. If this is the case, then our memories are, culturally speaking, universal, as whoever sees that film or hears that song has the same origin. We think with that image. We speak with that lyric.
Although Marcus is not interested in autobiographical writing, his work has more than a hint of metatextuality (I suspect he would disagree with this). Most non-fiction writers know, whether they admit it or not, that they are, indirectly, writing about themselves, whoever the subject, whatever the period. This might seem ugly, egotistical, and vainglorious. It might even go against their aim; they might be removed, distant, and objective. Yet it is no different from how, when we watch a film, we project ourselves onto the silver screen: when an actor falls in love, to a degree, we, too, fall in love; when they fall, we fall.
In 1986, Sam Shepard, co-writer of the song “Brownsville Girl”, asks Bob Dylan, “So you really liked James Dean?” “Oh, yeah. Always did,” Dylan matter-of-factly replies. “How come?” “Same reason you like anybody, I guess. You see somethin’ of yourself in them.” Stephen Scobie, in his 2003 book Alias Bob Dylan: Revisited, writes, “The Invisible Republic [Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (1997)] is essentially a self-portrait, as much about Greil Marcus as it is about Bob Dylan.” Yet What Nails It is different, as Marcus is supposed to be writing about himself. But this time, Marcus’ self-portrait is a portrait: the autobiographical look outwardly. Writers, even non-writers, can see themselves in Marcus’ words.
“I write because in 1966 I read Pauline Kael,” Marcus, 58 years later, pens in the second chapter. Marcus admires how Kael could contextualise a film, much like he does. Marcus is, first and foremost, a fan: this has been at the heart of his writing for all these years. Despite having an idiosyncratic style and being highly opinionated—mirroring Kael—it is always in pursuit of the subject, not himself, not about passing on his knowledge for its own sake. Marcus expresses that, during the writing process, small revelations take place in which the writer discovers and escapes. A transfiguration.
For Marcus, the critic does not have a higher knowledge or more significant response to a layman; rather, it is simply his job to investigate why he is responding in a specific way. However, Marcus is selling himself short: not many people, unlike him, can take an infinitesimal detail—in a song, film, or book—and elongate it to the point of showing its transformative effect when it would have gone unnoticed by most, including attentive critics.
Take, for example, Greil Marcus, in his book Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs, highlighting how Robbie Robertson—right after “Where her cape of the stage once had flowed” in “Visions of Johanna”—echoes two notes of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s 1928 version of his song, “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean”.
In What Nails It‘s third chapter, Marcus recalls visiting Basilica Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice, where he had a revelation upon seeing Titian’s 16th-century altarpiece Assumption of the Virgin. At that moment, he bought into the hierarchical belief that the only great art is high art, which, in turn, is religious art. This, in turn, is Christian art and something before and after he fundamentally disagrees with. However, he showcases how, in a trice, art can take over your feelings and make you lose your steadfast beliefs. We become subservient and narrow-minded. Devout.
Despite Greil Marcus imparting an abundance of reasons why he writes—for fun, for discovery, his obsession with the past—there is still no singular, concrete reason why he, someone, anyone, is a writer and another isn’t. All we know is writers write. Perhaps that is it. Perhaps not. Like the past, writing is full of unknowns and mystery, waiting to be discovered.